The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) says its work target work supporting NHS projects through Gateway 2 is paying off with approvals outperforming its overall rate in the last three months.
In its latest update, the BSR said approvals for healthcare projects was 84% for the three months to 1 August, slightly above the 82% national rate for Gateway 2 projects. This overall rate is up from 77% for the previous reporting period.
NHS applications, covering a range of building work from maintenance to new facilities, are now a separate tracked category by the BSR. It added it was managing 36 active NHS cases nationally “to support the delivery of safe, upgraded healthcare facilities”.
BSR acting chief executive Charlie Pugsley, said: “We are seeing positive momentum in building control approvals across all categories, including critical work to upgrade NHS hospitals and facilities.
“This progress is a direct result of our targeted improvement plans and our closer, more collaborative work with the NHS to resolve technical issues early in the design phase.”
The BSR said for the period it had made 349 building control decisions across all higher-risk building categories.
Last month the BSR said it was changing its approach to issuing building assessment certificates to remove “unnecessary complexity”.
BSR rest bearing fruit
Pugsley said the body’s wider reset in how it was assessing buildings with the creation of an innovation unit a year ago was paying off. He said: “By scaling up our resources and deploying integrated teams of registered building inspectors, fire and structural engineers, we are successfully clearing older legacy applications and accelerating determination times for new projects.”
The body said the changes would make the system proportionate and targeted and will also offer greater support to resident-led principal accountable persons.
